Since the explosive growth of the advertising industry that began on Madison Avenue in the 1920s, marketing has been about creating a story to make people want something. Conventional wisdom dictated that if you wanted to sell more of a thing, you appealed to a customer’s desire to improve his situation in the moment. Then when you needed to sell the next thing you did it again. Marketing became a game of rinse and repeat.

On the way to competing for attention and building brand awareness, companies neglected the opportunity to develop an affinity with their customers. A hundred years on we’re re-discovering the benefits of truthtelling and building deeper relationships with our customers. That journey to prioritising resonance begins by embracing and sharing our backstory.

Embracing And Sharing Our Backstory….

1. Connects us to our purpose and vision for our career or business.

2. Allows us to celebrate our strengths by remembering how we got from there to here.

3. Deepens our understanding of our unique value and what differentiates us in the marketplace.

4. Reinforces our core values.

5. Helps us to act in alignment and make values-based decisions.

6. Encourages us to be responsive to customers instead of being reactive to the marketplace.

7. Attracts customers who want to support businesses that reflect or represent their values.

8. Builds brand loyalty and gives customers a story to tell.

9. Attracts the kind of like-minded employees we want.

10.Helps us to stay motivated and continue to do work we’re proud of.

One of our most effective career and business development resources is hiding in plain sight. History, heritage and hindsight are powerful teachers. But we’re in too much of a hurry to reach higher ground to learn from them. Don’t be so busy trying to get from here to there, that you forget to embrace how you got from there to here. If you want to get better at connecting the dots between your past and your future, start with your backstory. My new book Story Driven shows you how.

Image by Marcel Schewe